Friday, 9 August 2013

DIY - Liver With Onion And Mamaliga

Dear honey buns,

Today I will introduce you to my second DYI on this blog :) In Romanian language we call it "Ficatei cu ceapa si mamaligutza" but in English it is "Liver with onion and mamaliga"... Heck! Mamaliga cannot be translated :) It is a typical Romanian dish made out of corn flour - Italians have a similar dish and they call it "polenta".

I must admit that it is one of the few things I can cook and that end up looking and tasting properly. I was in the mood of cooking this week so the other day (on Wednesday, to be precise) I cooked :) Hope I managed to impress Cozi :p as mamaliga is quite a hard thing to prepare properly ;)

So the first thing you need is to have a pot (like the one I have on the picture above - I had to ask my mum to buy me one from Romania as I did not find a proper one here in Poland - you really need to have a proper pot for "mamaliga" or else things will go terribly wrong...) - I made this recipe for a dinner with Cozi and with my fiancee and we ate till we dropped ;)

Ingredients:

For the liver with onion:
- around 800 gr of fresh liver (or more if you tend to like liver with sauce)
- 50 gr butter
- 1 huge onion
- 1 garlic head
- oil (sunflower)
- spices (marjoram, bay leaf, pepper and what else you would prefer or have in the house :p)
- Vegeta

For the "mamaliga":
- 1 liter of milk (over 2% fat it would be great!)
- around 400 gr of corn flour

First you start doing the liver as they take a bit longer to do... You first take the pot and put the oil and the butter (cut in small pieces) in it and you stir it around with a wooden spoon (I prefer using wooden spoons as this is how my grandmother and my mum are doing it, plus it is more healthy and it does not take taste from the spoon - like it would do in case it would be out of metal and such... plus it tends not to get hot, and as I am very afraid of getting burned it is perfect for me ;) what can I do?!).
When the butter melts in the oil you start putting in the huge onion that you cut into half and then vertically (it should look like small fishes and such...) - the whole onion should fry until it gets into this miraculous yellow stage :) When it does, put it the garlic - some of the garlic you can squeeze with a knife and put it in and some you can cut into small pieces.
Fry them a bit more and than add one by one the liver pieces and let them fry on all sides (make sure you clean the liver properly in multiple waters). Do not stir them with a spoon but rather move them along slowly and one by one - make sure they do not break as they are very fragile ;)
When they seem to be done on all sides add some water to they almost get fully covered and add the spices (you can also dissolve them into the water if you like ;) or you can just "powder" them all over the pot - your choice, your experiment). Let everything simmer down - the water should slowly disappear and the awesome sauce should start forming - in the meanwhile you can transfer everything from the pot into a regular pot and let them simmer down there (we need the awesome pot for the mamaliga now and we will do it while the liver simmers down ;) Wicked!)

P.S. In the meanwhile my fiancee had a surprise... Of course we also had some cheesecake again :p

So let us go back to cooking ;)

Mamaliga has only a few ingredients but it is one of the toughest things to do... You should use water instead of milk but this is my Granny's recipe (hush now... it is a secret!) and I will do it my way :) First you boil the water/milk and when you see it boil you start pouring in slowly the corn flour (powder it... it should be like a slow summer rain...). While pouring it you need to start stirring it in vigorously with a wooden spoon until you feel it becoming stronger and stronger (the consistency can be different, according to ones taste or on what you are eating with it - when I eat stuff with sauce I prefer it to be a bit harder so I can put the sauce on it and it gets absorbed). When you see it hardening you need to let it boil for like 5 min and then start stirring it again - by that time it should be done and you can "serve it while it's hot" ;)

P.S.S. You need to be careful on stirring all the time! Do not add too much flour at once or else it will not dissolve and you will end up having lumps of unboiled/uncooked corn flower. And we do not want that, do we now?!

In the serving form it should look something like this (the picture above) but do not get worried if it does not work out ;) it is a pretty hard dish :p and it is delicious :) and I must admit that my fiancee likes it and that says A LOT!!! :)

In case you have any questions regarding this, fire away! :) I can hardly wait for you to tell me how it went :)